A discussion on SQL Server
The September meeting of the SA SQL Server usergroup will be on the 15th of September. Venue and time are the same as always, 18h30 at the Microsoft offices
This month, Theo Potgieter will be presenting a session on lessons learn in deploying, maintaining, optimising and scaling a merge replication architecture
Hope to see you all there. Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes
From all indications, the first 24 hours of PASS was a resounding success. Hundreds of attendees for each session, minimal technical glitches. All in all, it went very well.
The first session I attended (well, part thereof) was Greg’s discussion on Spatial data. I would really have loved to see the entire thing, what I did see of it was exceptional, but I had to set up for my own session, and it was very difficult to listen to both Rick and Jacob going over last minute details and listen to Greg discussing geometry and geography. I’ll be sure to catch the entire thing once the sessions are available.
My session on indexes went quite well, with a good number of people attending. However it appears from some of the things I’ve read today that I totally messed up the explanation of order of columns in an index and confused the issue more than clarifying it. I think this presentation needs to go back to the drawing board. It works well enough with a small group of people in an interactive format, but not as a straight-up presentation with larger groups. Maybe some more diagrams would help, or more examples. I need to give some thought into what would work best.
Grant’s session on Performance Tuning was excellent, had me laughing at regular intervals, which was bad, I was watching it on my laptop at a local coffee shop. Other patrons must have thought I was crazy (and maybe they’re right). Grant got an infection of the demo-gremlins, but someone had to so that’s hardly a big problem.
I’m going to be speaking at the PASS ’24 hours of PASS’ event. My slot’s at midday local time (10 AM GMT) and I’ll be talking about indexing – what makes indexes useful for SQL Server
You can see all the sessions and speakers, and register for the event at the official site.
If anyone’s wondering why I’m announcing this so late, I wanted to do some tests of bandwidth to make sure that the local connections could handle Live Meeting before publically committing to this.
The August meeting of the SA SQL Server usergroup will be on the 25th of August. Please note this is a week later than we would normally meet. The change in scheduling is due to some logistical problems (the conference rooms were booked). Venue and time are the same as always, 18h30 at the Microsoft offices
This month, James Pheiffer, who recently joined the Premier Field Engineers at Microsoft, will be presenting a session on Performance Monitoring using Perfmon and PSSDiag
Hope to see you all there. Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes
On Monday the finalists for the 2009 Exceptional DBA awards will be announced and voting will start to determine who’s the most exceptional of them all.
Visit the Exceptional DBA website from Monday to see who the judges picked as the most exceptional of the candidates and to cast your vote for the candidate you feel is the most exceptional.
May the best DBA win.
Here’s the slide deck and demos for Shaun’s Table Partitioning talk
The July meeting of the South African SQL Server Usergroup will be held Tue 21 July, 18h30 at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston, 3012 Willam Nicol Drive.
This month’s meeting is sponsored by Ascent and Shaun Wickstrom will be talking about Table Partitioning
Look forward to seeing you there.
It’s going to be a busy 6 months in terms of conferences and speaking (well, busy for me, I’m just getting used to the whole speaker thing)
TechEd Africa
TechEd Africa is running from the 2nd to the 5th of August in Durban. I’m presenting two sessions there, one on query hints and plan guides and one on evaluating your indexing strategies. I’ll also very likely be helping out in the community lounge and the Ask the Experts area.
PASS Community Summit
I’m presenting two sessions at the PASS Community Summit this year. A spotlight session on titled ‘Lies, damned lies and Statistics’ and a general session titled ‘Insight into Indexes’
The spotlight session will be covering column statistics, why SQL creates them and how, when they’re updated, the importance of accurate statistics, some of the problems that can result when they’re not accurate and some maintenance strategies.
The general session will be looking at what SQL can tell you about indexes, how they’re been used, what they’re been used for and what indexes SQL thinks it wants, and how reliable all that information is.
SQL Usergroup
I’ll be presenting at the October meeting of the SQL Server usergroup and will be doing a final dry-run of one of the presentations that I’ll be giving at PASS. I haven’t decided which one yet.
Are you an exceptional DBA? Do you know an exceptional DBA? If so then it’s time to act. The Red Gate and SQL Server Central Exceptional DBA competition is back for a second year.
Start working on those nominations. Entries open on the 15th of June and close on the 10th July.
It’s time to prove who’s the most exceptional DBA of them all.
The June meeting of the South African SQL Server Usergroup will be held Tue 23 June, 18h30 at the Microsoft Offices in Bryanston, 3012 Willam Nicol Drive. The meeting is a week later than usual due to the public holiday on the 16th. This month Mark Stacey will be talking about Service Broker
Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes.
Look forward to seeing you there.